TICK-TOCK journalists argot for story listing chronology leading up to a major announcement or event. ... A tick-tock (the metaphor, obviously, of a clock moving toward a fateful hour) is often written with boldface dates indicating significant meetings or preliminary events, and is more reportorial than a “think piece” or "thumbsucker”…

April 29, 2013

Slow TV: Television dramas whose gradual, deliberate pacing and literary structure – “unrushed, atmospheric narratives,” as Salon’s Matt Zoller Seitz described them – demand patience and engagement on the part of the viewer. Current or recent examples include the Danish series “The Killing”; the BBC’s “The Hour”; and the American shows “Mad Men,” “Game of Thrones,” and “The Wire.”

Critic-turned-opinion-writer Frank Bruni, of the New York Times, observed in early April:

Slow TV pushes back at the instant gratification and empty calories of too many elimination contests, too many reality shows, too many efficient, literal-minded forensic dramas that perhaps keep certain plot threads dangling but tie up the episode’s main mystery by the hour’s end.

The descriptor “Slow TV” began appearing in the U.S. press around 2010. In a June 2010 review of “Memphis Beat,” Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley placed Slow TV in context:

Slow Food, a movement that began in Italy in the 1980s as a protest against agribusiness and fast food, promotes organic farming and regional cooking. That cult of less-is-more parochialism spread to other fields, including tourism (Slow Travel) and investment (Slow Money).

Now there is Slow Television.

In November 2010, the Hollywood Reporter’s Tim Goodman included “Rubicon” and “In Treatment” in the category:

These shows are the ultimate examples of what can best be described as Slow TV. It’s not quite a fad or a revolution — and given the dismal ratings, no one involved should feel comfortable about their futures — but you can’t give HBO and AMC enough credit for making shows like this in the first place.

Earlier citations for “slow television” come from Scandinavia, where the term referred to marathon, non-narrative coverage of an ordinary event. In 2009, for example, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) aired the complete seven-hour train trip from Bergen to Oslo – and then topped that feat with live coverage of a 134-hour voyage by ship from Bergen to Kirkenes. Both programs were popular successes. In February 2013 NRK aired a 12-hour broadcast about firewood, described as “slow but noble television.”

But the earliest citations I found are from Australia. David Dale, writing in February 2005 for the Sydney Morning Herald, presaged the current meaning of “slow TV” in a column about the slow-paced “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” and “Desperate Housewives”:

It was reminiscent of the marketing campaign for the new Orient Express train in the 1980s: “In a world where everything is fast and cheap, we are very slow and very expensive.” Then in the ’90s came the slow food movement, which argues that human beings are healthier and happier if they take time to appreciate what they are eating. Perhaps we are about to see a “slow television” movement.

(SlowTV is also the name of an Australian Internet channel that delivers “interviews, debates, conversations and public lectures about Australia’s key political, social and cultural issues.”)

In a November 2011 article for the BBC News Magazine, reporter Jon Kelly looked into the rise of slow TV. The growing popularity of the boxed set, which allows viewers to watch long-running programs on their own schedule, accounts for part of it. In addition:

[T]he pace of slow TV invites viewers to actively engage with the programme, rather than their normal treatment as passive, argues Dr Amy Holdsworth, lecturer in film and television studies at the University of Glasgow and an expert in small-screen history.

“Part of the appeal is working things out for yourself,” Dr Holdsworth adds. “They allow the space for viewers to invest in them and make connections for themselves.

“These days there is definitely more of an appreciation of what you can do with TV as a form - you can have so much more character depth in 80 hours than you can in a two-hour film.”

April 16, 2013

As recently as a few decades ago, most parents gave their children names that would help them fit in: to a family, a clan, or the culture at large. Now a lot of parents want exactly the opposite: names that stand out, as though children were boxes of cereal competing for shelf space. Standing out is the new fitting in. Three recent articles examine the trend:

“How Much Does Your Name Matter?” is a Freakonomics Radio podcast about the effect of a personal name on school performance, career success, and other outcomes. It opens with a story about a sociologist who named his children E and Yo.

“What Is a Popular Baby Name?” is Laura Wattenberg’s objective and surprising analysis of name popularity. “Even the most popular name in America is given to just one out of every 177 babies,” writes Wattenberg, the author of the respected – and, yes, popular – Baby Name Wizard blog.

NPR has launched an excellent new blog called Code Switch that covers “the frontiers of race, culture, and ethnicity.” Code switching is a term from linguistics, and many of the posts are about language. Start here, with the introductory post “How Code Switching Explains the World.”

How does our algorithm work? It periodically checks the New York Times home page for newly published articles. Then it scans each sentence looking for potential haikus by using an electronic dictionary containing syllable counts. We started with a basic rhyming lexicon, but over time we've added syllable counts for words like “Rihanna” or “terroir” to keep pace with the broad vocabulary of The Times.

April 09, 2013

A cursory search of the Internet reveals that people and things referred to in the media as ‘‘rock stars’’ include Rand Paul, the archbishop of Canterbury, the Samsung Galaxy S 4 smartphone, the Swedish mystery writer Camilla Lackberg and Pope John Paul II. Clearly, it’s high time we bought the term a watch and retired it.

—“On Rock Stars and ‘Rock Stars,’” New York TimesSunday Magazine, March 31, 2013. (The article is a bonus feature available in the replica edition to subscribers only. Here’s the accompanying article about business “superstars.”)

Popular in the 1930s; back in style again with the movies of Steven Spielberg, who uses a kookalouris with underlighting to show faces that seem to be illuminated by reflections from pots of gold, buckets of diamonds, pools of fire, pirate maps, and radioactive kidneys.

It’s fairly well established that cucoloris, however you spell it, comes from the world of Hollywood cinematographers. Beyond that, however, the word’s origins and etymology are frustratingly unclear. In an episode that aired last year, Grant Barrett, co-host of the radio show “A Way with Words,” told listeners that he’d spent “days” researching a Double-Tongued Dictionary entry for cookie.

“Hollywood is filled with people who like to invent myth,” Barrett said. “I counted seven different origin stories for this term, and they’re fun, but they’re throwaway.” The best story he encountered is from a footnote in a 1954 issue of the Western Folklore journal, which called cucoloris “a coined word of no special philological significance or implication.” The writer did suggest, however, that cucoloris “might be related to the famed director George Cukor.”

A claimed etymology is that kukaloris is Greek for “breaking of light,” but there seems to be no evidence to support this, nor can the etymological claims in the 2001 cite below* be verified. Another claim is that it is named after its inventor, a Mr. Cucoloris; however, this, too, lacks supporting evidence.

The word cukoloris is Gaelic and means “ghost charm.” How a Gaelic word became a standard term in film production is unknown.

__

A note about Roger Ebert: I never met or corresponded with him, but I was among his many admiring readers and Twitter followers—even when I was muttering “WTF?” about his conclusions. In 2010, I attended a program at the San Francisco International Film Festival at which he received an award; cancer had already taken away his ability to talk, but his impish wit and pointed opinions suffered not a bit from the intervention of a speech synthesizer. After answering questions from the stage of the Castro Theater, he introduced Julia, which starred Tilda Swinton – “Saint Tilda,” Ebert called her – and which Ebert assured us was a great, great film we were privileged to see. (Released in 2009, it had been largely ignored by theaters.) Now, I grant that Swinton is never less than fully committed to a role, but Julia was godawful: violent, amoral, ugly, pointless, and, at 144 minutes, seemingly interminable. About a third of the audience left before it was over. I stuck it out, but – to borrow a phrase Ebert himself made famous – I hated, hated, hated this movie. And yet I loved Ebert for championing it, and for being not just a critic but also an exuberant fan. I will miss him a lot.

March 11, 2013

Grist: Grain for grinding; ground grain. Unchanged in form and meaning since Old English; “perhaps related to grindan ‘to grind’ (see grind), though OED calls the connection ‘difficult’.” (Source: Online Etymology Dictionary.)* As Michael Qunion explains in World Wide Words, public grist mills were once common in Britain and the United States.**

In the 21st century we’re most likely to encounter grist, if we encounter it at all, in the idiom “grist for the mill,” which means “something that can be used to advantage,” as in grain that can be readied for flour. However, I recently saw the idiom rendered as “gist for the mill.” I dismissed it as a typo until I did a Google search and discovered more than 50,000 hits for gist for the mill.

One of George W. Bush’s Bushisms, first reported by Newsweek in 2000, was “I thought how proud I am to be standing up beside my dad. Never did it occur to me that he would become the gist for cartoonists.”

So it seems that a lot of people are substituting gist (the real point, the crux) for grist (grain) because they think it’s logical. In other words, they’re using a type of malapropism known as an eggcorn.

Gist is certainly more familiar than grist to modern-day, non-grain-grinding speakers of English. When gist and grist are pitted against each other in GoogleFight, the results are decisive.

Of course, the two words have different consonant sounds: the G in gist is /j/, while the G in grist is /g/. So I’m guessing that this particular eggcorn is based on mis-reading rather than mis-hearing. That is, if it’s an eggcorn at all: I couldn’t find it in the Eggcorn Database, which contains many examples of eggcorns based on mis-hearing: for all intensive purposesand minus wellare among the most common.

Designer Ben Pieratt has created a “brand in a box”—name, logo, URL, social-media accounts, website theme, and more—that he’s selling for $18,000. It’s up to the buyer to choose how to use it. The brand’s name is Hessian, which Pieratt says he chose to honor Richard Hess, an advertising art director who died in 1991. Until I learned that, I assumed it had something to do with the German mercenary soldiers who fought on the British side in the American Revolution, or possibly a type of coarse woven cloth. The domain included in Pieratt’s brand package is dot-tv, which may be a deal-breaker for potential buyers. Read more at AdFreak.

“To us, the unicorn symbolizes the never-ending quest for mastery”: a Tumblr of the absurd, pretentious, and just plain daffy things branding agencies say about themselves, from the understandably anonymous Agency Wank.

*

In a similar vein: Design Jargon Bullshit, ripped from actual websites. Sample: “We designed a series of bubbles that represented both the idea of the consumer as having options and the letter ‘o’.”

I’ll wrap this up with something substantial: “102 Spectacular Nonfiction Stories from 2012,” selected by Conor Friedersdorf and presented in alphabetical order by author’s last name. Not only does the list contain a whole bunch of articles I missed last year, it includes several publications I’d never heard of, like Idle Words and Defunct. I’m looking forward to getting acquainted.

February 11, 2013

Patchwriting: “A restatement of another writer’s text that uses too much of the original vocabulary and syntax.” (Word Spy)

Patchwriting has undergone a semantic shift since the term was coined, in 1993, by Rebecca Moore Howard, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Syracuse University. In “A Plagiarism Pentimento,” published in the Journal of Teaching Writing, Howard contrasted patchwriting positively with plagiarism:

[O]ur adherence to the received definition of plagiarism blinds us to the positive value of a composing strategy which I call “patchwriting”: copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonym substitutes. By failing to recognize patchwriting as a valuable composing strategy in which the writer engages in entry-level manipulation of new ideas and vocabulary, we fail to support our students in their efforts to assimilate the constructs of unfamiliar discourse.

(Emphasis in the original.)

Twenty years later, patchwriting has a more negative cast, possibly because the Web has made the practice easier and more pervasive, both on college campuses and in newsrooms. In a 2012 post on the journalism site Poynter.org, Kelly McBride criticized patchwriting as “problematic” writing—“the rearranged work of others”—that is “more common than plagiarism” and “just as dishonest.”

One writing teacher who doesn’t disparage patchwriting is Kenneth Goldsmith, a poet who teaches a course called “Uncreative Writing” at the University of Pennsylvania, in which students retype phone books and menus and plagiarize other writers’ work. (Uncreative Writing is also the title of a 2011 book by Goldsmith.) In a recent interview with The Awl, Goldsmith patchwrote most of his responses to the reporter’s questions and identified his self-poached sources. Here’s Goldsmith’s defense of Uncreative Writing:

The students that take my class know how to write. I can hone their skills further but instead I choose to challenge them to think in new and different ways. Many of them know how to plagiarize but they always do it on the sly, hoping not to get caught. In my class, they must plagiarize or they will be penalized. They are not allowed to be original or creative. So it becomes a very different game, one in which they're forced to defend choices that they are making about what they're plagiarizing and why. And when you start to dig down, you'll find that those choices are as original and as unique as when they express themselves in more traditional types of writing, but they've never been trained to think about it in this way.

“The new creativity is pointing, not making,” Goldsmith summed up.

Rebecca Moore Howard did not give an etymology for patchwriting; it appears to be formed in imitation of patchwork, the sewing technique. As far as I can tell, the name of the hyperlocal news network Patch (owned by AOL) has no relation to patchwriting. Rather, Patch’s sprouting-grass logo gives the impression of “a patch of earth.”

December 03, 2012

Kabuki dance: Political posturing; a performance that’s all style, no substance. Sometimes seen as Kabuki theater. “Kabuki” may be capitalized or lower case.

This sense of kabuki dance is found primarily in the U.S. It’s come up in coverage of the Congressional budget impasse (aka the fiscal cliff); the image of “dancing on a cliff” seems to be irresistible to reporters and pundits:

There will be a Kabuki dance when everyone comes to the White House next week for a meeting on the fiscal cliff. – Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post, November 9, 2012

The Japanese popular-theater form Kabuki literally means “art of song and dance”; the word Kabuki was adopted into English in the late 19th century during a flurry of Western interest in Japanese culture. (See, for example, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado.) It became more widespread in English-speaking countries after World War II, when Japanese theater companies toured the West.

To a culturally aware Japanese audience, traditional Kabuki is anything but empty posturing: every gesture is, on the contrary, packed with significance. “The quintessential Kabuki moment (known as a kata) is colorful and ruthlessly concise, packing meaning into a single gesture,” wrote Jon Lackman in an April 2010 article for Slate, “It’s Time to Retire Kabuki”:

It is synecdoche, synopsis, and metaphor rolled together—as when, in one Kabuki play, a gardener expecting a visit from the emperor cuts down all his chrysanthemums except one, the perfect one. And in contrast with our own shortsighted politics, Kabuki concerns not the present so much as a “dreamlike time shrouded in mist but ever present in the subconscious,” to quote critic Shuichi Kato.

But in American political jargon, the opposite holds true: Kabuki is always derogatory and condescending, connoting a lot of huffing and puffing without results. Lackman traces this meaning back to a 1961 article in the Los Angeles Times about a State Department plan to revise its security measures. “[By] finally dismissing Chester Bowles as undersecretary of state at the moment he did, the President unhitched the plan’s kingpin in this shoddy piece of left-wing kabuki,” wrote Henry J. Taylor.

(Lackman doesn’t mention it, but Taylor had served as US ambassador to Switzerland in the Eisenhower administration; in 1961 he was beginning a 20-year stint as columnist for the United Feature Syndicate.)

“Six months later, Taylor struck again,” Lackman writes. The quote: “Agriculture Secretary Freeman announced he has discussed Billie Sol Estes’ political corruption kabuki with Robert F. Kennedy and ‘had mentioned it informally to the president’.”

June 27, 2012

I didn’t know Nora Ephron, but that isn’t stopping me from taking her death—yesterday, of leukemia—very personally. Just a couple of weeks ago, after all, she’d been in my car, talking about her career at the New York Post, her incipient bald spot (she called it “my Aruba,” and you really have to hear her explain why), and that travesty known as the egg-white omelet. She sounded feisty and funny and thoroughly, you know, alive.

OK, she wasn’t physically in my car. But her voice was there, reading her most recent collection of essays, I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections, an audiobook I’d checked out from the library. I listened to all three discs, and then I listened to them again. And I remembered, again, how much Nora Ephron has meant to me.

Most of the tributes to Ephron have focused on her hugely successful movies. I’m sorry to say—which is, by the way, a phrase I associate with Ephron, as is “by the way”—that I remain a grumpy skeptic. Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, and When Harry Met Sally are too slick and schmaltzy for my taste, with heavy-handed soundtrack cues telling you exactly what to think and when to weep.

It was her journalism and essays that made me an Ephron fan, beginning with pieces in Esquire like “A Few Words About Breasts” (whose slam-bam ending was shamelessly swiped by Lionel Shriver in her novel So Much for That) and continuing through her sharp-eyed, hilarious work for The New Yorker and Huffington Post, some of which was collected in I Feel Bad About My Neck (2006) and I Remember Nothing (2011). Here was a woman who could be smart and funny on deadline. I loved her ear for the rhythm of a sentence and her eye for everyday nuttiness and sadness. I wanted to learn from her. I wanted to imitate her. I wanted to be her.

Except, probably, for the miserable marriage to that two-timing bum Carl Bernstein. Which, of course, she turned into a best-selling novel and hit movie, both called Heartburn. Take that, Watergate Boy.

Salander opened the door a crack and spent several paragraphs trying to decide whether to let Blomkvist in. Many italic thoughts flew through her mind. Go away. Perhaps. So what.Etc.

“Please,” he said. “I must see you. The umlaut on my computer isn’t working.”

He was cradling an iBook in his arms. She looked at him. He looked at her. She looked at him. He looked at her. And then she did what she usually did when she had run out of italic thoughts: she shook her head.

“I can’t really go on without an umlaut,” he said. “We’re in Sweden.”

But it wasn’t all wit on wry for Ephron. Read or listen to “Pentimento,” her essay about Lillian Hellman, in I Remember Nothing, to see how Ephron could illuminate the contradictions of a legendary personality and eulogize the painful end of a long friendship.

Then there’s NPR’s tribute, which combines a report by Neda Ulaby (whose name would no doubt have tickled Nora Ephron no end) with an intro and outro by “Morning Edition” anchor Renee Montagne. In the outro, at about 3:23, Montagne flubs the title of Ephron’s final essay collection, calling it I Can’t Remember Anything.